A friend since my law school days knew he’d been adopted. We saw a lot of each other when we both lived in New York City, where I met his adoptive parents. In a distinguished career, he’s been president of his professional society, recipient of honorary degrees in the US, France, and Greece, an advisor to the Director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, and he taught at several of this country’s finest universities and war colleges.

A few years ago, when we ran into each other at a professional meeting, he told me that he had discovered that his birth mother had tossed him out the window of a train headed for the concentration camps into the waiting arms of someone she hoped would save her infant son. He was working on trying to learn more about what happened.

My friend has been traveling in Europe but we’ve been in touch and I wrote and asked him what if anything he had found out. He wrote me back:

The short take on my background is that fortuitous circumstances produced reasonable evidence that I was born in France to a foreign family who had fled the Nazis, most likely from Germany. I was hidden in a village, smuggled out of France by the Jewish underground, entered the US as an illegal immigrant, was sent to an orphanage and adopted by an American family.

That of course is the family I knew. He adds that “I’ve managed to track down and interview people involved in these several steps.”

My friend was a “childhood arrival” in the language of Obama’s executive order establishing “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals,” or D.A.C.A. It allows people who were brought here as children to stay, study and work here without being deported so long as they behaved themselves properly. That’s the order that President Trump is trying to terminate. My friend was brought here as an undocumented infant. His birth parents likely perished in the concentration camps, without knowing what became of their son.

When I asked him if I could quote him for this commentary, he expanded on the process of his becoming an American:

immigration officials [looked] the other way when the group of 100 children I was with – all older than me – were offloaded at night from our boat and entered the country as illegal immigrants. We were sent to orphanages, from which I was liberated [by] the American family who adopted me. In NYC in the 1940s adoptions took five years to become legal, so I well remember appearing in court and telling the judge, in response to his questions, that my parents loved me and treated me well. He in turn had the court issue me a birth certificate with NYC as my place of birth, thus laundering me.

Half a century later, my friend is widely admired. “Most remarkably,” he added: “my German colleagues – many of whom are former students or post-docs – took it upon themselves to do something,” even though he didn’t have his original surname or birthdate, so that, in addition to his American citizenship, “courtesy of the German parliament – I am [also] a German citizen.”

I can only thank heaven that he and his boat weren’t among those this country turned back during World War II. For me and my friend, the issue of DACA is very personal.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, September 26, 2017.

Let’s talk about immigration in this current frenzy about keeping Syrian refugees out.

DAESH (ISIS) or al Qaeda used EU citizens to damage Paris. They will try to use Americans here. Some Americans have gone over to the dark side, trained abroad, could return and blend in here. That is a similar problem with deporting those undocumented people who have spent most of their lives here – in their countries of origin many have no ties, job history, knowledge of the culture or the environment. Deported, they are valuable to smugglers who use them to get contraband across our borders. Allowed to stay, they could be productive members of society. For Americans and immigrants alike, keeping people working at decent jobs is the best way to keep everyone out of trouble.

Population also affects national power, what we can produce, and the power we project. That is important in an increasingly dangerous world. Adding to the workforce and as consumers, immigrants increase the size and health of our economy, and instead of straining our budget, they help to sustain our social safety net, as many aging countries have been finding out.

Immigration is not without costs, however. China and India now each have over a billion people. India’s population has tripled since I was young. These are population explosions. Chinese authorities understood that China could not sustain population growth and slowed it precipitously.

Moving people from places where they live in fear to an America where they can live in peace and prosperity is neutral with respect to worldwide population. But it may do environmental damage if it means changing to an environmentally more destructive lifestyle. That makes it doubly important to control, limit and reduce environmental damage. It means that we should, must, continue to invest in ways to reduce our use of fossil fuels, and increase our use of solar and wind energy and passive solar heating. We must control our overuse of water, and invest in better ways to use it. We need to rethink our national land-use policies – it makes little sense to irrigate deserts for farmland and build suburbs on productive lands. We are shifting farmland from places that have plenty of water to those that don’t. That is not only wasteful, it also leads to drought, salinization of the land, and makes other settled places unlivable, save at the enormous cost of desalinization of seawater.

Ultimately both our goals for immigration and our goals for America, our children and grandchildren must be driven by concern for the people who will inhabit it. That means care and concern for the immigrants themselves, and care for everyone, those we are strongly attached to and all the people of the earth, expressed through environmental policies that can keep the earth habitable. In that effort we all have to be willing to share and accept effective regulation. There is no other way.

And yes, protecting the lives of our children and grandchildren requires some sacrifice. But aren’t the sacrifices we make for those we deeply care about one of the most satisfying things we get to do? All our faiths confirm those duties and affirm the joy of giving and caring. It’s hard to think of people as deserving who are unwilling to share in the general sacrifices for their and our offspring.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, April 5, 2016.